Advances in semiconductor processing and logic design have permitted an increase in the amount of logic that may be present on integrated circuit devices. As a result, computer system configurations have evolved from a single or multiple integrated circuits in a system to multiple hardware threads, multiple cores, multiple devices, and/or complete systems on individual integrated circuits. Additionally, as the density of integrated circuits has grown, the power requirements for computing systems (from embedded systems to servers) have also escalated. Furthermore, software inefficiencies, and its requirements of hardware, have also caused an increase in computing device energy consumption. In fact, some studies indicate that computing devices consume a sizeable percentage of the entire electricity supply for a country, such as the United States of America. As a result, there is a vital need for energy efficiency and conservation associated with integrated circuits. These needs will increase as servers, desktop computers, notebooks, Ultrabooks™, tablets, mobile phones, processors, embedded systems, etc. become even more prevalent (from inclusion in the typical computer, automobiles, and televisions to biotechnology).
Current operating system (OS) power management techniques implement dynamic control of processor power consumption indirectly by setting processor frequency. According to an OS power management protocol known as Advanced Configuration and Platform Interface (ACPI), performance or P-states are used by the OS to explicitly specify expected performance. Such performance values are semantic-less in that a higher performance value requested by the OS (e.g., 2× higher) will yield higher execution speed but the workload will not necessarily complete in half the time.